From the publishers of Lion's Roar

Thich Nhat Hanh

100 pages

Perfect bound on premium stock

$11.99 USD

This special publication honors one of the great spiritual teachers of our time. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the world's best-known Buddhist masters. He is renowned for his profound yet accessible teachings on mindfulness, relationships, psychology, happiness, Zen, political action, and saving the earth. Millions have benefited from his bestselling books and been inspired by his life of courage, action, and enlightenment.

This special publication is the third in the Lion's Roar Great Teachers Series. Like our popular tributes to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and American Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, it can be enjoyed by those who already know and love this great teacher and by those who want to know more about him. This beautiful keepsake edition will be treasured for years to come.

One way of taking care of our suffering is to invite a seed of the opposite nature to come up. As nothing exists without its opposite, if you have a seed of arrogance, you have also a seed of compassion. Every one of us has a seed of compassion. If you practice mindfulness of compassion every day, the seed of compassion in you will become strong. You need only concentrate on it and it will come up as a powerful zone of energy.

Naturally, when compassion comes up, arrogance goes down. You don’t have to fight it or push it down. We can selectively water the good seeds and refrain from watering the negative seeds. This doesn’t mean we ignore our suffering; it just means that we allow the positive seeds that are naturally there to get attention and nourishment.

Thich Nhat Hanh and the Joyof the Present Moment

—Rachel Neumann is publisher and editorial director of Parallax Press and a longtime editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings.

Thich Nhat Hanh (or “Thay,” as his students affectionately call him), is equal parts scholar and practitioner. An avid reader in multiple languages who comments on sutras and current events with equal ease, he presents Buddhist wisdom in a way that meets us where we are, making practice as concrete and simple as washing dishes, walking around town, or even using the bathroom.

Renowned author and critic bell hooks, a longtime admirer of Thich Nhat Hanh, met him in 2000 to talk about the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and how love can transform our society.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that you must have courage to love, that you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, that it does not come easy.

Martin Luther King was among us as a brother, as a friend, as a leader. He was able to maintain that love alive. When you touch him, you touch a bodhisattva, for his understanding and love was enough to hold everything to him. He tried to transmit his insight and his love to the community, but maybe we have not received it enough. Because we had clung so much to him as a person, we did not bring the essence of what he was teaching into our community. So now that he’s no longer here, we are at a loss. We have to be aware that crucial transmission he was making was not the transmission of power, of authority, of position, but the transmission of the dharma. It means love.

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You have also taught that to be in the presence of your teacher can also be a moment of transformation. So people ask me, is it enough that you’ve learned from books by him, or must you meet him, must there be an encounter?

In fact, the true teacher is within us. A good teacher is someone who can help you to go back and touch the true teacher within, because you already have the insight within you. In Buddhism we call it buddhanature. You don’t need someone to transfer buddhanature to you, but maybe you need a friend who can help you touch that nature of awakening and understanding working in you.

I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day. That is true. When they read a book by me or hear a tape and they touch the insight within them, then they have met me in a real way. That is the real meeting.